Search engine optimization is a game that can be hard to understand for most small business owners. Even if you understand it, it can be hard to implement or even do it correctly.
The first place to begin is with your keywords. It helps to develop a theme around what you expect visitors to search for when looking for your website. For example if you are a personal trainer, you’ll want to have more long-tail and themed keywords on your personal trainer website.
For example, it may be difficult to rank for “personal trainer” and less difficult to rank for “personal trainer San Francisco,” but it could be easier to rank for “best fitness personal trainer in San Francisco.”
Start by choosing your broad topic. In this example it’s “personal trainer.” Next start to think about good qualifiers, or modifiers, of this keyword. This will help define intent for your pages. Each page on your site must have a goal, or what you intend a visitor to do. Think of it this way: When Google crawls your site what do you want it to think each page is about?
Here are some ideas for these modifiers:
- Time
- Date
- Quality (best, cheap, easiest)
- CTA (buy, learn, find)
- Location
- Price
Find as many of these qualifiers as you can and then begin using a keyword tool, such as Google Keyword Planner, to help you find a larger variety of words that you could leverage.
Once you have your keyword themes and a few ones to use, check to see where they are on your page. If you have Yola Gold you can add your keywords to track and scan your site for errors. It will then find the places where you will need to add in these keywords.
If you’d like to poke around yourself, try adding keywords to the following places:
- Title tag
- URL
- Meta description
- Alt tags
You can also do some external research and search for the terms for which you are trying to rank. See what sites are ranking for those keywords and learn in what ways your site can do better.
Got some tricks up your sleeve? What keywords have you been using or ranking for?